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Paul's Time Sink

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music on Amazon S3

Paul Westbrook | 28 June, 2006 23:37

I mentioned ways to share music between multiple computers, so I did an experiment to see how storing music on Amazon's S3, with JungleDisk.  I copied a bunch of music on to the disk, and then added the tracks to iTunes.  When those tracks were played back, there was a significant delay before playback.

When an file is accessed from S3, with JungleDisk, the whole file is downloaded to a local cache, before the file is returned to the caller.  It should be possible to still use Amazon's S3 for this purpose, but the client on the computer would need to not do any caching.  It should be possible to pass the file descriptor directly from the http client to the file system.

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Mac OS X security hole

Paul Westbrook | 28 June, 2006 22:44

The Alastair's Place has a post mentioning a security hole in Mac OS X, where is is possible for an arbitrary application to get the admin password.  Once this happens, it would be possible for it to execute arbitrary code.  This hole allows any application to present the Admin Authentication dialog and make it look like it is coming from a trusted application.

Alastair reported this to Apple in 2003, but Apple hasn't responded.  I am not sure what they can do, since any application can make a dialog appear like an authentication dialog, even without using the standard system call.

Unfortunately, I don't see a way to easily determine if an application is using this trick.  It looks like the process name that is displayed in top and ps is the value from argv[0].

[via The Apple Blog]

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converting hex to binary

Paul Westbrook | 28 June, 2006 21:20

I can never remember the syntax to convert numbers between various bases with bc, and end up looking at the man page. 

Here is an example of using bc to convert a hex number to binary. 

bash$ bc
bc 1.06
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'. 
ibase=F
obase=2
01EA
110111101

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